Camp helps teens cope with terror attack losses

Even though they've only just met, the ties that bind teenagers Julie Griffin and Angel Serrano go back years. It's a bond that the two wish they didn't have, because like the 75 other teens and young adults at the Project Common Bond camp in this Virginia town, the two lost a close relative in a terrorist attack. Griffin's dad died in the north tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and Serrano lost a loved one in the Madrid train bombings on March 11, 2004. It's a loss they, like many other teens in the same situation, find hard to talk about with their surviving parent or friends. But at Project Common Bond, they learn through workshops in the morning and activities like sport, art, or dance in the afternoon, to break their silence and erase some of the loneliness of grief. "Communicating was something I avoided because who could I really talk to without them questioning me, judging me, not knowing what to say," Griffin, 18, said. "But when I came to Project Common Bond, I communicated with everyone so easily. You could be sitting at lunch and feel upset about your loss and talk about it. It's that easy -- you could talk about it at the lunch table. Everybody just gets it." Held since 2008, Project Common Bond this year brought together youngsters from a record eight countries -- Argentina, Israel, Liberia, Northern Ireland, Russia, Spain, Sri Lanka, the United States -- and the Palestinian Territories. "It's hard for me to talk to my mum about it, because it's different losses: she lost her husband, I lost my daddy," said Allie Stahlman, whose father was on the 105th floor of the north tower of New York's World Trade Center when a terrorist-piloted plane slammed into the skyscraper. "But here, there are a bunch of people who lost their dad. Everyone has the same problem or issue or loss, and no matter where you're from, from California to Sri Lanka, everyone has something in common that we can all relate to," the 16-year-old said. "We have this connection that we don't have with anyone else," added Mijal Tenenbaum, 17, who lost her grandfather in an attack on a Jewish community group in in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people in 1994. At the afternoon art session, as Serrano drew a smiley face on Griffin's hand, Madina Alikova, 14, crafted a letter "M" from a red pipe cleaner. Madina lost her mother in the three-day siege at School Number One in Beslan, Russia, in 2004. More than 330 people died when the Russian authorities launched a disastrous rescue operation to free some 1,000 people, mainly mothers and young children who were being held by Chechen rebels who stormed the building during a back-to-school celebration. "This camp has helped me a lot. It helps me to forget the loneliness," Madina told AFP. Twenty-year-old Palestinian Fadwa Sarrawi's father was shot in the head in 2001 as he stood outside the family home in Nablus. Prasad Illippuli Achchillage, 18, never knew his father, who died in a terror attack in Sri Lanka in 1993. "I don't even know how to pronounce some of these people's names but if they start to get upset, it's easy to hug them and they hug you back," Stahlman said. "You have that connection. There's something about it. You know their pain." Joanne Murphy, 19, never knew her grandmother, who was killed 40 years ago in "the troubles" in Northern Ireland. "It still impacts our family every single day. But coming here has made me realize there are other people out there who have been through similar or worse experiences, and together we make each other strong," she said. In art class, the teens painted "peace poles," and made collages on old LPs to create "personal records" of their dreams and hopes and worked on postcards that will be delivered to New York in September for the ceremony to mark the 10th anniversary of the attacks on New York and Washington. Numbers and nationalities attending the camp are likely to swell in coming years, when the organizers feel they can invite youngsters from Norway, India, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Iraq and other countries to attend. "It's too soon for some of them, like Oslo or Mumbai," said Candy Cuchara, project director at Tuesday's Children, which helped to organize Project Common Bond. "You have to allow time first for the grief to attenuate and then we can reach out to them and let them know that we're here, and they're not alone."